Idle asks the pertinent question du jour: where are all the [Tory] activists?
Where are all the people who want to get involved in their communities, to help people they agree with to become councillors, perhaps to become councillors themselves, to help the people they agree with to get into Parliament, to help people they agree with to get into office, to help the people they agree with to win by-elections, etc. etc.?
I don’t have an answer. All I can say is this. I grew up with Tories all around me. My mum was on the council for sixteen years. She famously had to escape from hospital after having my younger brother chopped out of her so the administration didn’t fall. My metropolitan intellectual dad stood as a paper candidate in a Midlands industrial constituency in the one that Heath lost (I think). All my parents’ friends were met delivering leaflets, discussing the important questions of their time and in raucous street-fights in marginal constituencies (OK maybe not the last one).
And yet the organisations that they so loved barely exist as far as I can tell. I went to a Bow Group meeting once a few years ago and took an instant dislike to everyone else there. It was as if everyone there had heard of the organisation and thought they should turn up. When I moved to my current part of town I joined the local constituency association, went to see a speaker and joined in the drinks after. I found everyone a bit smug. I recently re-joined in the hope that I could fine common cause and maybe even get to know some nice people in my area but something holds me back from actually going to one of their policy forums.
It might just be my defective anti-social personality, of course. But then I look around at what my friends get involved with. Lots are involved in community activities but none are involved in party politics. Why is that?
Maybe people don’t want to spend the time? In the 60s and 70s apparently it was perfectly normal for professionals to get sloshed at lunchtime and roll away from the office betimes. None of my contemporaries would get away with that!
Or are we fighting different, smaller battles? I am on my estate committee and I go to residents’ meetings and make a fuss at them. Others fight non-party fights about human rights issues. Maybe these micro-skirmishes have replaced the broader questions about our national future?
Maybe we’ve reached a point in the political cycle where most people agree on the biggest questions so it doesn’t matter which flavour of the consensus gets into power?
But that doesn’t ring true to me. We don’t have the Russians and the IRA trying to beat us into submission but we still have a good old argument about whether more or less government is the best way to run the country. The European question prompts angry superiority from all seventy four sides of the argument. We have always had campaigning lawyers. People have always had something to moan about to the council.
Has my generation lost its sense of idealism? Did we grow up in a world where career trumps all? Or most depressingly of all, do we collectively think that there’s no point in trying?
Becuase the Tories are no longer Tory. Just the same shiny suits and all round wankers that Labour and the Lib Dems are…
Plus modern politics has been set up to disenfranchise the people as we’re not going to get a say on serious issues such as the EU, Immigration, etc.
I did mean to put into the post a question about whether we’d lost interest because councils and Parliament have so little actual say now that so many decisions are taken in Brussels.
“Becuase the Tories are no longer Tory”
That’s circular, Johnny – if there were more Tory members, the ‘leadership’ would have to be more Tory
BE is right, politics has become less apocalyptic (lefties are no longer heavy-duty marxists in the pay of a communist state actually planning to invade us; nor anarchists actually blowing things up; nor Unions actually causing the country to grind to a halt): and people of goodwill like our host BE get stuck into local issues
Miss Drew is a case in point: she was interested in the Bow Group (because, like BE’s, her dad was v. active there when it was a seriously fine outfit for young metro-tories to discover how Westminster politics & Fleet Street really work) but found its 21st C incarnation to be insufferable – so she dived very constructively into estate / neighbourhood politics. Another younger acquaintance of mine, of similar ‘would-be tory activist’ mien, in his spare time is into getting a new Free School off the ground. Even the greeny-lefties, misguided as they are, seem to be more keen on small-scale practical action than large-scale fantasy-politics posturing
in some ways this state of affairs has much to commend it: Raedwald is always on about the virtues of localism and there’s a lot of truth in that. The trouble is, it leaves the self-appointed metro-careerists to take over constituency parties that have become state-funded shells, and run Parliament for their own amusement. (And of course there is the whole EU angle, which only gets worse when this miserable new political class is so far up the EC’s arse …)
however, it all goes in big cycles (with an unhelpful lag effect): when the next apocalyptic threat becomes too big to ignore, people will feel the need to organise around bigger-picture issues again
Also, were the Tories ever Tories? OK so in the 50s they weren’t so nice to gays but they still built huge numbers of council houses and joined in the post-war mixed economy consensus with enthusiasm. You probably have to go back to the 20s before you find a government that didn’t engage in Keynesian policies.
ND thanks for a great comment. I’m glad I’m not the only one who found the Bow Group a turn-off!
You and Raedwald are right about localism. The problem remains that even if “sound” people do good works in their local communities there is still a government making a nonsense of things at a higher level! My boss in convinced that we’ll carry on down this unsustainable path until the economy breaks completely. I don’t want him to be right, but he might well be.
Maybe the hard left were right all along, and what sensible people should do is become entryists, pretending to be metro-careerists until they have a chance to actually do something useful.
You and Raedwald are right about localism
Mr R is a bit of a localism fanatic – I have seen some great things and applaud & support them; but am skeptical (judiciously, of course) having also seen some ghastly instances of localism gone sour, rancid, and all the way to toxic
there are some things that can only be addressed at a higher level
the alternative is warlordism – and not all warlords are benign in their dictatorship
Well of course I wouldn’t want to see peace walls built along Chancery Lane to keep the border secure. And yes there is a risk of local corruption but surely it is not beyond the wit of man to have strong local administration *and* good supervision?
Checkout the way the Swiss run their country.